Swimming: Sautin dive adds to gold medal collection

The Russian diver Dmitry Sautin added to his medal haul at the World Championships yesterday by winning the men's synchronised three-metre platform with Alexander Dobroskok.

Sautin, who collected his 11th gold medal and 20th in total from Olympic Games, World Championships and World Cups, earned a total of 369.18 points with his partner.

It was enough to see off the challenge of the Chinese pair Wang Tianling and Wang Feng (343.29pts) and the Germans Andreas Wels and Tobias Schellenberg (334.44pts).

The Russians had been leading after the preliminaries and Sautin, who arrived on the diving scene in this same city in 1992 as a teenage bronze medallist in the individual three-metre event at the Barcelona Olympics, made sure of a winning return.

The Chinese divers, who won four out of the five men's gold medals at the Fukuoka World Championships two years ago, were back in top level competition after missing the final legs of the 2003 Grand Prix because of the SARS outbreak.

China's women divers took the 10-metre synchronised final, with Lao Lishi and Li Ting rattling up 344.58 points to beat Australia's Loudy Tourky and Lynda Dackiw (323.34pts). Russians Evgenya Olshevskaya and Svetlana Timoshinina took third place with 300.12pts. The top three automatically qualify for next year's Athens Olympics.

Lao and Ting entered the water out of sync for the fourth dive ­ being awarded just 67.20 points ­ but a magnificent 90.78pt final dive clinched victory. The 15-year-old Lao said she was confident of winning the 10m individual on Wednesday, but expected serious competition from within her own team and from Canada's Emilie Heymans.

Viola Valli, of Italy, successfully defended her 5km open water title to claim the first gold medal of the championships, while Evgueni Kochkarov, of Russia, won gold in the men's event.

The shortest of the three distance races began and ended in the harbour, adjacent to the centre of the city's downtown area. There was little wind and water temperatures touched 25C throughout the course.